to that first rank? That’s closer than the drugstore.”
I didn’t answer him. Not then.
About an hour later I found Ollie holding up the beer cooler and drinking a Busch. His face was impassive but he also seemed to be watching Mrs. Carmody. She was tireless, apparently. And she was indeed discussing human sacrifice again, only now no one was telling her to shut up. Some of the people who had told her to shut up yesterday were either with her today or at least willing to listen—and the others were outnumbered.
“She could have them talked around to it by tomorrow morning,” Ollie remarked. “Maybe not ... but if she did, who do you think she’d single out for the honor?”
Bud Brown had crossed her. So had Amanda. There was the man who had struck her. And then, of course, there was me.
“Ollie,” I said, “I think maybe half a dozen of us could get out of here. I don’t know how far we’d get, but I think we could at least get out.”
“How?”
I laid it out for him. It was simple enough. If we dashed across to my Scout and piled in, they would get no human scent. At least not with the windows rolled up.
“But suppose they’re attracted to some other scent?” Ollie asked. “Exhaust, for instance?”
“Then we’d be cooked,” I agreed.
“Motion,” he said. “The motion of a car through fog might also draw them, David.”
“I don’t think so. Not without the scent of prey. I really believe that’s the key to getting away.”
“But you don’t know.”
“No, not for sure.”
“Where would you want to go?”
“First? Home. To get my wife.”
“David—”
“All right. To check. To be sure.”
“The things out there could be everyplace, David. They could get you the minute you stepped out of your Scout into your dooryard.”
“If that happened, the Scout would be yours. All I’d ask would be that you take care of Billy as well as you could for as long as you could.”
Ollie finished his Busch and dropped the can back into the cooler, where it clattered among the empties. The butt of the gun Amanda’s husband had given her protruded from his pocket.
“South?” he asked, meeting my eyes.
“Yeah, I would,” I said. “Go south and try to get out of the mist. Try like hell.”
“How much gas you got?”
“Almost full.”
“Have you thought that it might be impossible to get out?”
I had. Suppose what they had been fooling with at the Arrowhead Project had pulled this entire region into another dimension as easily as you or I would turn a sock inside out? “It had crossed my mind,” I said, “but the alternative seems to be waiting around to see who Mrs. Carmody taps for the place of honor.”
“Were you thinking about today?”
“No, it’s afternoon already and those things get active at night. I was thinking about tomorrow, very early.”
“Who would you want to take?”
“Me and you and Billy. Hattie Turman. Amanda Dumfries. That old guy Cornell and Mrs. Reppler. Maybe Bud Brown, too. That’s eight, but Billy can sit on someone’s lap and we can all squash together.”
He thought it over. “All right,” he said finally. “We’ll try. Have you mentioned this to anyone else?”
“No, not yet.”
“My advice would be not to, not until about four tomorrow morning. I’ll put a couple of bags of groceries under the checkout nearest the door. If we’re lucky we can squeak out before anyone knows what’s happening.” His eyes drifted to Mrs. Carmody again. “If she knew, she might try to stop us.”
“You think so?”
Ollie got another beer. “I think so,” he said.
That afternoon—yesterday afternoon—passed in a kind of slow motion. Darkness crept in, turning the fog to that dull chrome color again. What world was left outside slowly dissolved to black by eight-thirty.
The pink bugs returned, then the bird-things, swooping into the windows and scooping them up. Something roared occasionally from the dark, and once; shortly before midnight, there was a long, drawn-out Aaaaa-rooooooo! that caused people to turn toward the blackness with frightened, searching faces. It was the sort of sound you’d imagine a bull alligator might make in a swamp.
It went pretty much as Miller had predicted. By the small hours, Mrs. Carmody had gained another half a dozen souls. Mr. McVey the butcher was among them, standing with his arms folded, watching her.
She was totally wound up. She seemed to need no sleep. Her sermon, a steady stream of horrors out of Doré, Bosch, and Jonathan Edwards, went on and on, building toward